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Show USE AND ABUSE OF SETTLEMENT LAWS, 1880-1904 481 that Sparks and his agents uncovered. Sparks might for his own benefit have taken a leaf from Joseph Wilson's book. As Commissioner of the Land Office in the sixties Wilson went to great length in describing the public land states and territories and their development as encouraged by a benevolent land system. He never uttered a word of criticism. Sparks saw only the unfavorable side, in his opinion almost everyone in the West was trying to take advantage of badly drafted and weakly or corruptly administered land laws. Lawrence Lee, who has made an intensive study of land entries in western Kansas, has offered an explanation of why settlers during the great boom of the middle eighties disliked the 5-year requirement of the homestead law. Knowing that in the past swift changes had come in the weather cycle, they preferred to acquire ownership of their land more quickly through preemption or commutation, particularly while credit was still abundant. After 1887, when credit tended to dry up like the weather, a much larger number of settlers then gained titles to their tracts through the required 5 years of residence.54 Lee's data is not sufficiently clear nor based on a wide enough investigation to enable him to show statistically what proportion of settlers who tried to homestead failed, what proportion commuted, and what proportion abandoned their claims or sold relinquishments to others. However, from the intensity of his investigation he arrived at a statement he could not statistically prove and it is, therefore, an intuitive guess: "Despite the number of failures, many, many of the would-be homesteaders who went to Kansas were accounted successful homesteaders. They were able to turn their freely granted "Lawrence B. Lee, "Kansas and the Homestead Act, 1862-1905" (Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Chicago, 1957), 488-93. government land into places of permanent abode. They weathered all adversity and contributed their traits of perseverance and pluck, their willingness to adjust to new environmental conditions to the upbuilding of modern Kansas." 55 It is impossible to correlate the census data of farms for the area beyond the 100th meridian with the various settlement entries without an intensive study of the entries and the original census schedules, but some information is available for Kansas. In the 31 Kansas counties either bisected by or west of the 100th meridian there were in 1900, 13,040 farms containing 6,029,300 acres or having an average size of 462 acres. The lowest average was in Norton County on the 100th meridian (263 acres) and the highest was in Clark (2,754 acres) in southern Kansas and likewise on the 100th meridian. Settlers or ranchers in 20 of the 31 counties had on the average more land than a homestead, timber claim, and preemption would amount to and they had probably acquired their additional land from others who had gained title legitimately or through commutation and preemption for resale, or they might have bought from the Kansas Pacific or the Santa Fe Railroads. Settlers in the 11 other counties could have acquired their land through a homestead, a timber claim, or a preemption.56 Since Congress had not been willing to liberalize the homestead unit the Preemption and Timber Culture Acts seem to have been essential for the establishment of land use units of reasonable size in the region west of the 100th meridian. What was necessary was not repeal of these measures but the adoption of adequate safeguards to prevent them from being abused by timber interests, cattlemen, K Ibid., p. 494. ^Twelfth Census of the United States, Agriculture (Washington, 1902) , computed from Parts 1 and 2. |